Imagine being pregnant in northwest Alaska. You are hundreds of miles away from the nearest doctor. You go into labor. Your only means of transportation- a four-passenger plane- is somewhere else that day. With no other options, your family brings you to the village's health clinic. The practitioner rolls in a cart stacked with computers, TV monitors, and cameras. This hodgepodge of equipment, she tells you, is your surrogate doctor. You are not going anywhere. You are about to deliver the community's first "telebaby."

This really happened to a resident of Alaska's Northwest Arctic Borough. This region is located far above the Arctic Circle, where temperatures reach 50 degrees below zero and more than forty inches of snow falls each year. 7,300 people populate the district's 11 remote villages. That's 1 person per every 5 square miles across an area the size of Indiana. No roads connect the villages to each other or other parts of Alaska. All travel is done by boat or small plane-weather permitting. Newspapers are delivered days after publication and natives live a subsistence life-style.

Despite these conditions, doctors 200 miles away, in the town of Kotzebue, were able to guide the village's health practitioner through the entire delivery using live, two-way video and voice technologies. "It was as if the doctors actually were in the room," explained Dennis Tiepelman, president of the Maniilaq Association. His organization, a non-profit tribal consortium, led the effort to fund and establish telemedicine technology in each clinic throughout the district.

What's an even greater miracle is that technicians were installing the equipment in the clinic that very day. "As soon as she arrived, we worked as fast as we could and scrambled to set it up before her baby was born," stated Eugene Smith, chief information officer of the Maniilaq Association.

Prior to telemedicine, local practitioners communicated with remote doctors via telephone. However, language barriers made it complicated, since seventy-five percent of the residents in the NWAB are Inupiat Eskimos and English is their second language. You can imagine the difficulties it caused for practitioners explaining symptoms or describing injuries to doctors who only spoke English. Telemedicine provided the solution. "A picture truly says a thousand words," explains Tiepelman.

Now, more than half of the doctor's contact with patients is through telemedicine and thousands of "tele-exams" occur in the district each year. Tiepelman estimates that telemedicine is saving the community a great deal of money each year, since patients do not have to fly to Koztebue each time they see a physician.

About GCI ConnectMD

ConnectMD is owned and operated by GCI (Nasdaq: GNCMA), an Alaska-based telecommunications company that has been successfully providing solutions to customers for over 25 years. The unique combination of telecommunications expertise, a focus on healthcare, and proven experience delivering medical network services, regardless of location, distinguishes ConnectMD from other health IT solutions. Currently 140 facilities are securely exchanging medical data and have access to a suite of health IT tools and services on the ConnectMD medical network.

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